Wireless communication services for mobile vehicles, such as navigation and roadside assistance, have increased rapidly in recent years. Global Positioning System (GPS) satellite technology has played an important part in these services. With the aid of GPS technology, the position of a vehicle or mobile device may be determined at any time.
A substantial portion of any driver's time is spent on frequently traveled routes, such as the ones used by drivers daily commuting to work or school. Often the route to work or school is traveled using roads with heavy traffic. The periods of heavy traffic usually coincide with a person's daily commute. In many communities there has been a concerted effort to reduce the number of vehicles on the road during peak travel times. These efforts largely consist of encouraging commuters to carpool. What is lacking in many of these efforts is an organized efficient system of bringing together potential carpoolers leading to almost no reduction of the number of vehicles on the road.
A better system for linking carpoolers together would alleviate some of the congestion that occurs during normal commuting hours. More importantly, reducing the number of vehicles on the road leads to a reduction of exhaust pollutants that are harmful to the environment.
US2005/0049781A1 discloses a method and system for providing a carpool service. The method includes steps for receiving a user carpool enrolment request, obtaining the positional information of the user's moving vehicle, storing the positional information as a route in a service centre database and sending at least one available match based on the carpool enrolment request and the routes in the service centre database to the user. The software searches for other subscribers in the database that travel the same or nearly the same route.
A problem with the solution in the above identified patent application is that the matching is based on the route of single journey and the corresponding departure and arrival time. However, a match on said features will not result into a car pool agreement between two users if they will not travel on the same days.